Frontier Group Holdings

ULCC

Market cap $1.31B

Budget carriers like Breeze, Allegiant and Frontier are swooping in on Spirit's former routes as well as circling its valuable takeoff and landing slots at bigger airports.

Julian Richardson worked as a flight attendant for Spirit Airlines for about eight years. He was shocked to hear about Spirit's shutdown, despite hearing rumors of it for years.

After Spirit Airlines vanished from the skies, its not-quite-sudden collapse raised questions about why the successful low-cost model, born in the U.S. airline industry, is failing.

A Frontier Airlines plane struck a person on the runway at Denver Airport on Friday. Videos show passengers ignoring crew instructions to leave their bags on board.

The collapse of Spirit Airlines, one of the industry's fiercest discounters, has given U.S. budget carriers more room to lift fares, but its exit does little to fix ​the long-running strain on the cheap-flight model.

A Frontier Airlines flight reported it struck a person at Denver International on Friday, the airport said. Denver International added that a "brief engine fire" was extinguished by firefighters at the scene.

A Frontier Airlines passenger jet ​abandoned its take-off for Los ‌Angeles late on Friday after suffering an engine fire and reportedly striking a ​pedestrian on the runway at Denver ​International Airport, the airline and the ⁠airport said.

The recent grounding of U.S. budget carrier Spirit Airlines could help ease shortages of next-generation RTX spare engines needed ​to keep late-model Airbus single-aisle jets flying, industry executives and analysts say.

A round-trip ticket from Las Vegas to Dallas-Fort Worth cost $39 on Spirit Airlines the morning of May 1.

Wall Street seems to have crowned Frontier Airlines as the main beneficiary of Spirit Airlines' demise — judging by the stock's 20% move higher this week. Markets also like that Frontier has enough liquidity to withstand the onslaught of rising jet-fuel prices.